December 27, 2009

If you have been living under a stone the last years you did probably not hear about the Copenhagen Institute of Futures Studies. a nice think tank in what has become my favorite city in the Nordics (besides Oslo of course, being my hometown.)

These people have been making some serious research and have gathered an honest view on how the Internet is changing the world radically and making the impossible possible within the life of a single generation. A central part of this analysis relies on the view of Anarchism as the driving political force behind such a change and the freedom-by-default attitude of individuals of this newer generations. Their analysis this far has not said much on the political implications of this change but kept itself to the social and economical spheres.

Now, I am not going to argue whether you agree or not or what your views on anarchism are. We can discuss that later. For me anarchy, or better yet its synonymous acraty (α-, “no” and κράτος, “cohersion, violence”), is what you get when you take democracy to its utmost consequence.

For now I want you to take a view at a couple of things:

Anarconomy

We are witnessing a pronounced flourishing of free content and services on the internet, created and distributed by the users themselves in voluntary networks according to rather anarchic principles: Wikipedia, open source software and books, music, films, and design, which the creators make freely available.
All this challenges and supplements traditional commercial companies by offering non-commercial alternatives. This is anarconomy. In the future, anarconomy will move out of the internet and also radically change economy in the physical world when we can make our own consumer goods on 3D printers with a basis in open source blueprints.

If you want to understand more about Anarconomy you can see the review of and read the report (Danish and English) on this page here.